(upbeat music) - My name is Paul McClellan.

I'm general manager and co-owner of iggy's Alive & Cultured.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (soothing music) Being kind of in the heart of the Salish Sea like this we have access not only to the natural resource but to agricultural producers to culture in town and our own little restaurants and communities in our towns.

Iggy's alive and cultured was founded by Ilgvar Daga, Iggy.

And he was one of the first farmers at the Bainbridge Island Farmer's Market.

And he's been fermenting things for over 30 years.

And in the farmer's market, he saw that there was less than perfect produce and he wanted to create good, nutritious, appealing food out of that.

And so he started using some of his fermenting skills to make sauerkraut.

So in 2012 with a partner of his, Sean Madison, they started iggy's Alive and Cultured for fermenting sauerkraut.

They were joined by Heather Wolf who had a great deal of experience as an herbalist and she helped formulate these flavors of a Jun kombucha.

That's a honey based kombucha one of the first commercially available ones.

One of the coolest places in the business is the apothecary.

It's a library of all of the botanicals, the spices in the herbs that we use, both for the brews and for seasoning the krauts.

You walk into it and just the all the smells coming together, it's so inspiring.

And when we try to collect together these ingredients we're looking for things that are going to create a delicious flavor that are going to be healthy for people.

It's why we do all of the extracts ourselves.

We don't want something that's laboratory produced or mass produced.

We're taking the whole herbs and spices making the extracts and then brewing that into the products.

You have some raw material from nature, and then you have a community of organisms that work on that.

The first part I would say about fermentation is you can't force it.

You can't control it.

You can create and control the circumstances in which you're fermenting, but by trying to coerce or control it, you could easily kill it.

Letting it express itself to create the circumstances for a ferment to happen so that it can be the best expression of that.

Fermentation for us is a metaphor for culture in all of its senses.

The microbiological level to culture between humans to culture considered globally.

Diversity's a big buzzword, but it's an absolute fact of life that it requires diversity in order to function.

What we see in our fermented foods, in our fermented cultures is that if we don't find ways to continually renew that culture, it's not going to thrive.

So it has to have something from the previous culture but also something new.

In the same way as humans in the company, we think of ourselves as the company as a small community of organisms, we need that same thing.

We have to have that consistency of a continual culture but also something new that comes in and reinvigorates it.

So at iggy's we do different fermented beverages and foods using different fermentation techniques.

So as an example, beet kvass, it's earthy, It expresses terroir and very much the same way that a wine does.

We really recommend that whenever you're trying any of iggy's beverages, that you try it in a tulip glass like this.

So you can really get the aroma and get the, just the best taste possible.

It's not like a wine, but it works the same way that a wine does in that it pairs with food like roast meat, roast vegetables.

So in this case, we have the Hawthorne Rose which uses rose hips, rose petals, cardamom, a little star anise.

This would go with great with Indian food, Chinese food any Asian cuisine would work really well with that.

This is Hibiscus Sage.

So you have this fruitiness, that light color of the hibiscus.

And at the same time, a green herbaceous aroma and flavor from the sage and the damiana here.

Finding this amazing community of people that seem to be drawn towards iggy's, people who are interested in food, interested in culture both in the small sense and the large sense.

It created a rewarding work environment, the type of place you wanna show up every day.

I've been healthier.

I've been happier in my life from that.

(guitar strumming) - [Announcer] Made There is made possible by the generous support of viewers like you and visit Kitsap peninsula.

Thank you to Made There supporting sponsor the Greater Kitsap Chamber.